Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Analysis

A collection of twelve state-of-the-art contributions to experimental philosophy, using corpus linguistic data to inform philosophical debates.

Experimental Philosophy and Corpus analysis explores foundational philosophical concepts through the use of digitised collections of machine-readable written or oral formatted texts.

By analysing “real world” linguistic data they are able to engage with how language is used in ordinary settings. The collection makes use of corpora—curated collections of written or oral texts that represent an area of language use – to inform a wide array of philosophical debates. Covering the base form of the words, part-of-speech tagging, robust parsing, term and name identification, morphological analysis, anaphora resolution, syntactic structure, and references to Philosophical concepts in daily language.

This collection brings together philosophy with corpus linguistics not only to serve as exemplifications of different approaches to corpus analysis, but also to defend the use of corpus linguistics in philosophy. It moves away from data generated via vignettes and questions devised by an experimenter who might attempt to shape responses in a particular way and with a particular bias. Making the case for digital analysis and naturalised language in Philosophy makes it an important and exciting addition to Bloomsbury’s Advances in Experimental Philosophy series.